November 04, 2005
Thoughts on Exploding Popes Part III
(Hat tip to Joan's Place).
As David Cressy (Bonfires and Bells, London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989) has demonstrated, the origins of Guy Fawkes’ Night lay partly in the conscious inculcation of a set of approved patriotic demonstrations that would wed the English populace more closely to the Crown, to the Protestant religion, and to their self-notion of themselves as a free island people in constant danger of envelopment from the Catholic continent, their foreign enemies abetted by a Fifth Column of traitorous home-grown Papists. The older medieval calendar of Saints Days and indigenous festivals, some of which receded dimly into ancient Pagan rite, was slowly replaced by this new Authorized Version of more politically relevant ceremonies such as Coronation and (in the Restoration period) Royal Oak Days. Bell-ringing, torch-lit parading and the reading of pedagogical sermons was officially sanctioned to root the new customs into the popular consciousness, and pastors dwelt in length on the symbolic universalism of the Plot, not merely an attempt on the life of a King but a threat to the nation as a whole - a conspiracy of such diabolical comprehensiveness that no level of hyperbole could be unfairly reached, as Francis Herring showed in 1610:
The quintessence of Satan’s policy, the furthest reach of human stain and malice and cruelty, not to be paralleled among the savage Turks, the barbarous Indians, nor, as I am persuaded, among the more brutish cannibals.
The Gunpowder Plot was retroactively associated with the defense of England against the Spanish Armada in 1588, and as other examples of Catholic mendacity came forth so these too became elements in the celebratory mix. The thwarting of the Popish Plot and the successful carrying out of the Glorious Revolution added more proof of God’s peculiar favor towards his chosen people, as first evidenced by his staying of the assassin’s hand in 1605. At its best, Gunpowder Treason Day became a nationalizing cement that helped to create common cultural associations between the English regions; at its worst, it countenanced the kind of sectarian ugliness that burst forth in the Gordon Riots and can still be seen in the worst of the Ulster Unionists’ Orange Lodge ceremonies.
This dogmatic element has always been a part of the Lewes Bonfire tradition. The town still associates its November 5 celebrations with the memory of the 17 local Protestant martyrs executed during the pogroms of ‘Bloody Mary’ Tudor in the 1550s. The principal area of modern Bonfire activity, East Sussex and Kent, was by no coincidence a Puritan heartland after the restoration of the Protestant orthodoxy in Elizabeth’s reign. The English South Downs, looking onto the European mainland with no little trepidation, is rich in invasion lore. Its physical landscape of Armada beacons, Martello towers and anti-aircraft guns speaks of a centuries-long siege mentality in which the threat of foreign domination by Pope, Emperor or Fuehrer has been no abstract historical speculation but a real living presence in the community’s development. True to this spirit, Bonfire has always possessed a mildly jingoistic temper, originally a religious phenomenon but - as creeping secularization has doused the passions of theological controversy – increasingly expressed in nationalistic idiom. Guy Fawkes and his Pontiff have shared the stage with whichever other Aunt Sallies of the moment are deemed a threat to English liberties; Tsar Nicholas I, Napoleon III, ‘Oom Paul’ Kruger, Kaiser Wilhelm and Saddam Hussein have in their turn been honored with top billing in the festival of immolation. Even the significance of ‘Rome’ as a geographical target of Bonfire’s opprobrium has been deftly recycled in modern times. Now that city is a symbolic center not of Papal ambition but of the bureaucratic gnomes of the European Community, a point observed in a 1998 leading article on Lewes in the staunchly anti-federalist Daily Telegraph:
Even today, when the Holy See has long since abandoned its temporal claims, that symbolic resistance remains valid. British sovereignty is now threatened, not by zealots on behalf of the Bishop of Rome, but by zealots on behalf of the Treaty of Rome.
To Be Continued
Posted by Alan Allport at November 4, 2005 07:07 AM